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The Mona Lisa Curse
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The Mona Lisa Curse

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Robert Hughes, the longtime Time art critic, argues that something went badly wrong with art somewhere around Andy Warhol. Filmed shortly before his death, Hughes revisits the postwar New York scene he covered as a young critic and traces how Pop Art's embrace of commerce curdled into an art world run by auction houses, hedge-fund money, and a handful of dealers like Larry Gagosian. He walks through Sotheby's and Christie's sale rooms, talks to artists and collectors, and takes open aim at Damien Hirst's diamond-encrusted skull and Charles Saatchi's collecting empire as symptoms of a market that now prices work by speculation rather than merit. Robert Rauschenberg appears as a counterexample, an artist Hughes still admires. Hughes doesn't hide his contempt for what he sees as a con game dressed up as culture, and the film works as both a history of the last fifty years of the art market and a bitter last word from one of its sharpest critics.